F1 Series so far

6 races. 6 winners. Great competition. Alonso atop the leader board. Interesting qualifying. Michael P1 in Monaco, only to be sent back to 6. Can't wait for Austin.

2012 Formula One Season Starts Now

Sitting and watching qualifying for Australia. Since some of my faceboook friends may now know results, I will post my thoughts here.

Should be an exciting season.

Six former world champions in the field.

Qualifying

Q1

Kimi failed to make it out of Q1. Put a wheel on the grass, did not make it to start/finish in time to turn a final flying lap.

Red Bull fairly far back in the pack, hopefully they are waiting for later rounds to turn it up a notch, but they are struggling for down force.

Q2

Alonso beached the F2012 half way through the session. Yellow flag then red flag.

5:00 to play - top of the time sheets looks like last year. Hamilton, Button, Vettel, Webber.

Mercedes seems to be the engine to beat.

Alonso time held for a while, but just as the session ended he was pushed to relegation. No Ferrari in Q3.

Q3

4 former champions still in the hunt: Hamilton, Button, Vettel, Schumacher.

Hamilton P1. All McLaren front row Red Bull pushed to 5, 6.

More tomorrow when the season starts down under.

2011 Canadian Grand Prix

2 plus hours of red flag. Lots and lots of rain. But a great exciting race. Vettel showed a flaw in the last lap and Button took advantage. Last 10 laps were ultra exciting. Always fun when cars switch from full wet to intermediate to dry tyres. Very glad that Fox kept the tried and true broadcast team of Varsha, Matchett, Hobbs, and Buxton. Guess that is the benefit of Fox owning Speed TV. Over to Speed TV for interviews.

Riding the rails

On NJ transit the conductors are much like many metropolitan train conductors I imagine. The one interesting thing is that they have pads of paper and hole punches. They seem to do strange things with these. For instance this morning a young lady was paying for her ticket with cash. I was too distant to hear the interchange with them, however after she handed him a 5 dollar bill he reached into his pockets and produced a pad of pink pages. He took his mighty hole punch and punched 9 very specific holes on the paper before handing it to the young lady, I think he retained a copy of the punches but I cannot be sure. When he came to me I handed him my ticket (a piece of paper with printing on it) and in exchange he handed me another piece of paper with printing on it. This paper had the numbers 2-23 printed on it. At some point further in the journey he came and took this paper from me. Odd.

The Event

So far I have been enjoying this program. It is of course far fetched, talking of aliens, teleportation and other such things. Today however a very stupid thing happened - not stupid in the scientific sense, but rather in the "how stupid can a character that is supposed to be the Chief of Staff for the President" be stupid. For those that haven't yet seen the April 4 episode this is a very minor spoiler. Agent Lee is discovered as a sleeper, upon discovery he searches frantically for a way to escape, only when he is almost out of the white house does the CoS order a lockdown of the building. To quote Bugs Bunny: "what a maroon!"

A few iPad frustrations

Overall the device is handy. Here are just a few frustrating things about the iPad:

• the email search capability only searches header fields and not email body
• iPod and iTunes seem to be lacking a few details like I cannot easily connect to my iTunes server I can't be sure if this is due to the new home server utility or not either way I don't like it this should be simple
• I still hating the autocorrect - the blackberry shortcuts are by far better
• I still can't find a task list manager I like - outlook task list manager is marginal, lotus notes is a disasster, I've tried appigo todo and a few others none seem to be quite what I want
• I don't like that many of the apps are buy now use later, not enough trial versions

Life with the iPad

Have loaded a few handwriting applications. Don't have one that in like yet. I was speaking with a friend today and we were lamenting the fact that Palm Pilot writing capability or similar wasn't included. The auto-correct is a bit dicey. Maybe it's jut my fat fingers but I seem to always be moving the cursor around when typing. While typing this post it disappeared and I had to go looking for it again. Once again the I wasn't capitalized. The shortcuts I have in my blackberry are very cool and I wish I had then here. I like the financial apps but they always seem to be just a little lacking.

New iPad

A few weeks ago I finally picked up an iPad. So far it has been interesting. I've loaded apps to take notes in meetings although the OCR isn't quite there, track my 73932 todo items, read mail and surf. Still experimenting, not sure if I could use it as my only device but it is fun. I notice spending in dribs and drabs has increased as apps and iTunes hit me for $2.99 here $1.99 there. I just loaded a blog reader which fortunately pulled in my google reader rss feeds. The facepad app is a little clunky. I don't really like the auto spell check it frequently guesses wrong and I still cannot quite get the keyboard to work quite right. Overall I'm happy but not ecstatic with it. I do think that this device or ones like it could help turn the bend on *stupid* applications that user cannot possibly understand. The CNBC and Bloomberg apps were great.

Astronomy Pic

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Another Big Race Day - Sunday May 30

Time to fill up the DVR!

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F1 - Turkish Grand Prix - Looking forward to the 4 apex turn 8 and to see if Red Bull can continue its domination. I have both drivers and their chassis in my Fantasy F1 Team

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Indianapolis 500 Not quite as much fun as when it was Monaco, Indy and Coca-Cola but a lot of racing nonetheless. I haven't really followed the time trials for the Indy, which I normally do. I still recognize quite a few of the names - many are now 2nd and 3rd generation racers - Andretti and Rahal at least on former F1 racer - Takuma Sato and Sara and Danica are back in the pack away. Could be an interesting race.

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Coca Cola 600 Haven't really been watching a lot - looking forward to being in Charlotte later in the year.